


Alone

by despommes



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 17:09:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17750024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/despommes/pseuds/despommes
Summary: “I am so achingly, blisteringly lonely. I told you I came here to be alone, but the truth is I have been alone this whole fucking time. And I couldn’t stay at Skyhold any longer because if I had to walk into that room and see those damn murals on the walls one more time I was going to throw myself from the tallest tower I could find. And so when I came here and saw you, I…”"You felt less alone."





	Alone

**Author's Note:**

> This is set after my story, Wildfire. I know that one's not complete yet, but we can all guess how it ends.
> 
> Please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

“You know,” she mutters, adding another log to the fire, “I came to Suledin Keep to be alone.”

The set of his thin lips remains unchanged. “I will remind you that _you_ invited _me_ for a drink.”

She rolls her eyes. “I only meant that I wish you’d sent word to Skyhold you were here. Gave me a fucking fright.”

“Are you frightened of me?”

Sansa scoffs. “No.”

She had spiced wine and she had whiskey. When offered a choice, Abelas opts for the wine. She pours it into a crystal glass for him, and then pours herself three fingers’ worth of the whiskey. He takes a reasonable sip. She knocks hers back with a few quick swallows.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, voice harsh from the drink.

Abelas eyes her over his glass from his chair. She can tell he’s deliberating whether to ignore the question or tell her the truth. The answer surprises her. “My mother was born here.”

“Oh?” she asks. “In the keep?”

”It was not always a keep. It was once a palace.”

"Was your mother nobility?”

He blinks at her “No. She was a slave.”

“Right.” Sansa pours herself another drink.

Her bedchamber is small but comfortably furnished. A pair of armchairs sits in front of the fireplace, one of them currently occupied by Abelas and his glass of wine. In the corner there is a sturdy-looking oak desk covered in documents. Against the wall is a grand four-poster bed, besotted with pillows and heavy bedding. Sansa’d had half a mind to request a cot from the barracks in its place. She finds sleeping in a four-poster bed akin to lying in a cage all night. In the end she decided not to bother Rylen with it.

“That wine is better served warm,” she says as it occurs to her she could have offered to heat it over the fire for him.

“It is fine this way.”

She stands in front of the fire, back turned to him. The flames jump in the reflection of her eyes. She is uneasy. She drums her fingernails against her glass.

Abelas shifts in his seat. “Inquisitor—“

“ _Don’t_ ,” Sansa hisses. “Please. Don’t call me that.”

“… I apologize,” he says. “Sansa. I can leave you be if you have changed your mind.”

“No,” she says softly. It is almost a plea. “Stay. I’m fucking this up, aren’t I?”

“You asked me to join you for a drink. We are drinking. So far I am unaware of what you could have fucked up.”

“Don’t play games with me. We’re both grown. A woman does not invite a man to her bedchamber for a drink and a friendly chat. Surely the implication of that has not changed in the past thousand years.”

“Now you are starting to fuck this up.”

“… I’m sorry.”

Abelas stands. He moves closer to the fire, until he is standing next to her. He grabs for the glass clutched in her hand, and for some reason Sansa lets him take it. He places it on the mantle.

“Why have you asked this of me?”

Sansa looks up at him. She meets the challenge of his eyes. “I like sex.”

“There are other men in this keep. Knight-Captain Rylen would gladly have you if you were to ask. You are aware of this.”

“I don’t fuck _shem’len_.”

“Neither do I.” She glares at him for that. He does not flinch. “And yet you have asked me here. Why?”

“Why did you accept?” she fires back. “If you don’t fuck _shems_?”

“I asked you first.”

Sansa does not weep. She told herself this when she’d watched Solas disappear through the eluvian, as she clutched the stump where her arm had been and wailed after him like a babe through a torrent of tears. She tells herself this again as her eyes begin to burn and glaze over.

"Would you like to know why I really came to Suledin Keep?”

Abelas does not answer her. He simply stares, his expression unreadable.

“I was escorting a carriage. A Dalish clan had been wiped out by a group of Orlesian deserters and the only survivors were three little children. The oldest must have been… I’m not sure. Eight maybe? We were taking them to Wycome, to my clan, where they would be looked after.”

She picks up her glass again and tilts her head back to swallow its contents.

“Three agents of Fen’Harel had fastened a canister of gaatlok under the carriage axel. They ambushed us after it detonated. Five killed, all three children dead. I heard them screaming as they burned alive.” Her eyes shut tightly. “I tried to save one of them. A little girl. She was reaching for me through the flames. The… the skin on her hand _melted_ when I touched her. She was trapped under the wheel and I couldn’t get her out.”

“Sansa…”

“Please let me finish. If this stays inside of me any longer I will lose my mind.” She takes a breath. “One of Fen’Harel’s people was killed in the fighting and the other two we questioned there on the road. A woman and a very young man, both elves. The boy had _vallaslin_ on his face. I _screamed_ at them. I broke his nose and nearly ripped the girl’s scalp from her head. One of the guards had to pull me off of her, and she _laughed_ at me, said I was pathetic. Said she couldn’t imagine what Fen’Harel saw in me, that I was a traitor to the People. That she fucked him better than I ever had. I cut out her tongue, and when she took too long to choke on her own blood I strangled her with my hands. After she was dead I realized that she _looked_ like me and it made me so fucking sick I puked.”

“She could have been lying.”

“She wasn’t.” Sansa laughs, a broken sound that dies in the warm room like a bird flying into a closed window. “I didn’t sleep for three days, but when I finally drank enough to drown out the screaming he found me in the Fade. He tried to tell me none of that had been sanctioned, that those agents weren’t even supposed to be in the Free Marches and I punched him so hard he fell. I said, where he puts his cock these days is none of my concern. But the next time he has a moment of weakness with a child-murdering bitch and she comes bragging to me about it with the blood of Dalish wains on her hands I’ll send her head to him on a pike. And then he said he was _sorry_.”

She slams the glass back down on the mantle.

“I guess some part of me really wanted him to say it wasn’t true. He apologized to me, and that just made it real. And I didn’t want his fucking apology. I wanted to kill him. He left me two years ago, and it never occurred to me that he could be fucking other people because I’m still reeling over the fact that he’s _gone_.”

“So now you want the be the one fucking other people.”

“Yes!”

Tears finally break the threshold of her eyes and stream down her cheeks. “I am so achingly, blisteringly lonely. I told you I came here to be alone, but the truth is I have _been_ alone this whole fucking time. And I couldn’t stay at Skyhold any longer because if I had to walk into that room and see those damn murals on the walls one more time I was going to throw myself from the tallest tower I could find. And so when I came here and saw you, I…”

She scrubs at her face. She feels weak and very, very vulnerable in front of him. Abelas’s gloved fingers gently pry her hands away, and when she looks up at him with watery eyes she’s reminded of how painfully beautiful he is. He towers over her, all high cheekbones and winding green vallaslin, and not for the first time she longs for the ink that had once marked her own face.

“You felt less alone.”

“… Is that wrong of me?”

He turns her hand over in his to look at her palm. He studies the lines in her skin, the callouses at her knuckles from a lifetime spent nocking arrows. She has scars and knots and hangnails, and she wishes that her hand was pretty and soft.

“Since the others and I dispersed from the Mythal’s Temple, I have lacked direction.” He reaches up to draw down the hood over his head. The long, pale braid of his hair slides over his shoulder. Sansa wonders if it is as soft as it looks. “We went our separate ways. I wandered. I wanted to see how the land had changed. Who its people were. This world is so different from the one I knew outside of the Temple, and I started to yearn for something familiar. I came here on some wayward whim to feel closer to my past. And yet I find you.”

His fingers gently follow the freckles spanning her forearm. The ghostly touch sends a shiver through her.

“When you drank from the well, you swallowed my life’s purpose. You took on the sorrow of my people, and with it their memory.”

“Do you hate me for it?” she asks.

“No.” Abelas’s mouth, normally so serious, quirks so minutely she thinks she could have imagined it. “I am free. Lost, but free. And I can see why he chose you.”

She swallows the lump swelling in her throat.

“If our people are to have a future in this world, it will be through you. The goddess Mythal could see that. And so could Fen’Harel. So can I.” He steps closer. Sansa’s pulse jumps in her throat and her eyes are glued to his lips. “And you are not the only one who has been alone for too long.”

He cranes his neck to plant a quiet, fleeting kiss to the corner of her mouth. She leans into him. His skin is warm.

“I cannot love you,” she whispers.

“I am not asking for love.”

“Good.”

He kisses her. She moans, high in her throat, tilts her chin up for him. She wants to tear away the soft leathers he wears and have him there on the floor, but the fingers cradling her jaw hold her steady. He kisses her slowly, tastes her in languid sweeps of his tongue until she parts her lips for him. He tastes like lukewarm spiced wine and the whiskey she’s been drinking. She licks at his teeth, bites his lips until he leaves her mouth to suck at the hinge of her jaw.

“Abelas,” she pants. He does not answer, too busy trying to make his way to her collarbone. “I… _fuck_.”

He bites down on the meat of her shoulder and she gasps. Sansa tangles her fingers in his braid and yanks him back up. He smirks at her. “My apologies,” he murmurs, but she doesn’t believe for a second that he is sorry.

“The bed,” she says into his mouth, “is behind us.” Sansa reaches down between his legs, grabs his cock through his pants.

He chuckles. “I am aware.” He kisses her again. His hand slides down behind the laces of her breeches, and when he finally touches her she can feel the breath catch in his throat. “ _Fenhedis_ , you’re wet.”

“Mm.” The hand in his braid pulls him down so that she can whisper in his ear. Her lips graze his skin with each word. “ _Garas, aman na'mis_.”

Abelas groans. The words seem to undo something in him, and she takes advantage of it. She herds him backwards, his lips at her throat and his fingers still teasing at her sex, until his calves connect with the mattress. He sits back and gazes up at her. She’s never been with a man quite as tall or as broad as he is, and even sitting down he almost matches her full height. Sansa unlaces her boots and kicks them off, then reaches for the catches on her jacket.

“Sansa,” Abelas says softly. She stops. He places a hand at her hip. “I have not lain with a woman for centuries. Please. May I undress you?”

“I… sure.”

She takes a step back. Abelas’s fingers carefully undo the catches on her jacket, one by one. He slips it over her shoulders. It falls to the floor. Next he gently rucks up the white linen vest, eyes following the growing line of her exposed skin. She lifts her arms, allows him to pull it up over her head. It joins the leather jacket. As his arms encircle her to reach the knot of her breast band, he plants dry, tickling kisses at her navel. It makes her shiver. She misses the sensation when he straightens to uncoil the fabric from her chest. When he is finished, he drags his lips up the split of her ribcage and between her small breasts. His hands deftly undo the laces of her breeches and slide them down her legs. The only things she’s left wearing are her long woolen stockings, tied at the middle of her thighs with sturdy straps of leather. Those too fall away, Abelas taking great pleasure in slowly untying their fastenings.

“Touch me,” she whispers. He takes her nipple in his mouth and suckles at her. She clutches at the nape of his neck to pull him closer. She tilts her head back, her mouth falling open as she lets herself feel him. He cups her between her legs and she gasps when he grinds his thumb over her clit. The heat building behind her belly is a slow, gentle hum and she loses herself in it.

Abelas pulls away from her breast and in the firelight she can see his pupils are blown wide. Sansa falls to her knees then, her hands sliding under his tunic to finally feel his skin. She shoves it up his torso.

“Off,” she barks, and with a smile Abelas complies.

His entire body is covered in the curling green _vallaslin_. Great branches of it wind down his collarbone, over his arms and the backs of his hands. He is muscled and strong; a warrior’s body. Sansa feels very small kneeling between his thighs, and she thinks she rather likes it. When she peels his leather leggings down his thighs, she sees that the ink continues down, over his legs and cresting out over the tops of his feet. A line of it arches over his torso and ends in a fine arrow-like point, just above his pubic bone.

His cock, just like the rest of him, is unnervingly pretty. Abelas lies back to rest on his elbows. He watches silently as she studies him from this angle. The shaft is long and elegant. The head of him is flushed a hard blush pink where the foreskin has pulled back. Sansa leans forward and gives it a lingering kiss. She hears his breath stutter, feels the falter in his lungs from where her ear rests on his belly.

“Good?” she asks, and licks a broad stripe up the length of him.

“Yes,” he hisses. His head tilts back. She can see the knob of his throat bobbing as he swallows. “And I think you knew that.”

She swallows as much of him as she can. A dry, short moan leaves him and his hips rolls gently. As she brushes her tongue along the crown of him, Abelas reaches out and grabs the end of her braid. He pulls it loose, easing it apart so her wild red hair tumbles over her shoulders in waves. He tastes like earthy salt and rain.

“You are uncannily beautiful,” he tells her.

Sansa pulls her mouth away from him with one last wet kiss and rises to climb into his lap. She straddles him, her knees on either side of his thighs. He curves a hand around the back of her skull, bringing her close so their foreheads touch.

“Kiss me,” she says. He does. He pulls away and brushes his thumb over her red lips.

“I want to taste you.”

“Then taste me.”

She sidles off him, rolling away to stretch herself out on her pillows. Abelas gazes at her from where he kneels at the foot of the bed. Sansa coquettishly closes her legs together, her hands over her breasts. She looks up at him with heavy lidded eyes. He moves closer, rests his fingers over her knee.

“ _Garas_ ,” he says lowly. He gently pries her legs apart. One kiss to the side of her knee, another to her hip bone. Another at the crease of her thigh. “ _Aman na'mis._ ”

Sansa tries to choke back a sob as his mouth descends upon her. There were no more gentle kisses. His tongue sweeps through the wet, pink slit of her once, twice, three times. Each pass ends closer and closer to her clit, but never quite close enough. Her hands scrabble against the sheets for purchase.

“Abelas,” she gasps, “please.”

His golden eyes flicker up to her. She doesn’t beg for things, but she has half a mind to start. Eventually he takes mercy on her, and without breaking eye contact slowly sweeps his tongue over the flushed pearl of her sex. She moans. He does not relent. Abelas hooks one of her thighs over his shoulder, and then the other. It opens her wider to him.

She’s on the verge of coming faster than she would have liked. Her belly quivers with each shivery breath. She feels herself falling quickly and reaches her hand to tangle in his hair.

“I—,” she whines, and just before she comes Abelas slides two fingers inside of her. “Oh, _fuck_.” Her back arches and her body bows over him. He persists, tongue thrumming over her as she shudders around his hand. She feels like she might hyperventilate, gasping for breath in short little gasps.

He coaxes her through her climax until she is spent, her chest heaving and her thighs trembling about his ears. She’s granted a brief moment of respite for him to lay a few light kisses up her leg. Just as she begins to wind down, Abelas pulls her close and licks a slow, measured line over her sensitive core. Sansa flinches, overwhelmed. She whimpers, hips squirming, but he anchors them to the bed, eyes again locking on to hers. Watching her. She claws the sheets. The pleasure is flaying her nerves raw but she can’t bring herself to tell him to stop. The curl of his fingers inside knocks the wind out of her, and suddenly she’s close again. She calls his name, reaches out for him, twists his hair around her knuckles. This time is like the inevitable pull of a great wave, and just as she’s about to crash to shore he stops.

“Bastard,” she whines, throwing her head back against the pillows. “ _Fen’harel ver na_.” She regrets the words as soon as they leave her lips, but Abelas is smiling when she looks up at him. He wipes his mouth with the heel of his hand, tongue peeking out to lick his bottom lip. She swallows. That clever, clever tongue.

“Forgive me,” he murmurs, spreading her legs to make room for himself. Sansa feels her heart flutter. She feels him now against her lips, hot and velvet soft. His hands span her belly, her ribcage, over her breasts to flick his thumbs over her nipples. She mewls wantonly. His body bends over her and he says hotly against her ear, “But it will not be the Dread Wolf who takes you tonight.”

Sansa cries out. With one measured, slow roll of his hips he is sheathed entirely inside her. The slide of him is a delicious burn, and she thinks, as she buries her face into his neck, that she really has _missed_ sex. She’d missed the smell of it, the sound of skin on skin, the heat of someone else’s body. She relishes the tense and release of Abelas’s muscles as he starts to fuck her.

Abelas is more reserved than Solas when it came to making love. During sex, Solas had worn every thought, every sensation in his expression, and she’d taken great pleasure in seeing him that way. She’d relished hearing the sounds he made when he was normally so, so quiet. He made love to her like at any moment the world could have opened beneath them and swallowed them up. Like he would never have enough time to know her body the way he wanted to. Abelas is more calculated in the way he fucks her. His hips move in long, measured strokes that she surrenders herself to. Any sounds he makes are quiet and bitten off behind clenched teeth. She’d always enjoyed vocal lovers, but she finds his control very, very exciting.

The contrast is a relief.

Sansa had been close before, with his head between her thighs, but the edge has since crept just beyond her reach. For the moment she is glad to enjoy the push and pull of his cock. Her fingers trail lightly up the nape of his neck, the lightest touch she can muster. It pulls a contented sigh from him. His breath gently rustles the curls falling into her face. It makes her smile. The bed creaks with every pass of his hips in a steady and solid rhythm. The thought of someone else hearing their passion might have made another woman blush, but she didn’t mind.

It seems like they do this for hours, the take of his body and the give of hers. Sweat glistens off their skin in the firelight, hers flushed a ruddy pink and his still that pale, translucent ivory. She wonders if he’s ever blushed in his life. She thinks she could continue on like this forever, then his hand snakes between their bellies. Her breath catches as he slips his fingers between her folds, searching, and when he finds what he’s looking for she sobs.

“Abelas,” she gasps, and she can feel the smirk against her collarbone. His hips continue to rock in that steady, grounded rhythm but suddenly it is no longer enough. He’s brought her back to that precipice he’d left her at and she’s clawing for the edge.

“Yes?” he asks. She groans in frustration.

“Motherfucker.” Sansa grits her teeth. “ _Pala em elvar’el!”_

He stops for a moment and she thinks she might kill him. Abelas sits back on his heels, pulling at her legs so that they rest hooked over his shoulders. This time when he returns to her body she lets out a long, desperate moan. The bend of her legs allows him deeper, and now all she can do is cling to his arms as he picks up his pace.

Now the great, monstrous frame of her four-poster bed slams against the stone wall. She’s too far gone to be bashful about it. Staring at Abelas, watching the roll of his muscles as he tries to fuck her through the mattress, she hopes somebody hears. She wants the whole keep to hear. She hopes Solas can hear it from whatever hole he’s crawled into, fucking whichever red-headed whore he’s tried to replace her with. When Abelas circles his thumb around her clit again, she hopes he hears her wailing as she comes in long, delicious waves, her body trembling around this new man as though it were made for him. Her anger threads itself into her climax, embellishing it like scarlet weaving into bright, warm gold, and it’s _good_.

When he spills inside of her she welcomes it. Sansa sees the clench in his jaw, the way his brows deepen. He thrusts once, twice more and then his mouth falls slack. Even though she has only just finished, her body still reeling and sensitive, she slides her fingers down to touch herself as she watches him. She wants to memorize the looks on his face and the bow in his back as he comes. The rush of warmth spreads in her belly and she hums, feeling like the cat that got the cream.

Abelas leans down and kisses her. She winds her arms around his back and licks at his lips. She squeaks as he pulls away from her body, watches as he leaves her bed to look for something. Sansa shivers, suddenly chilled without the warmth of another body, and crawls underneath her quilts. When he returns he carries a glass of the wine in each hand, one for the both of them. She accepts hers and is pleasantly surprised to find that the drink is delightfully warm.

“Has it truly been centuries since you were last with a woman?”

He chuckles, but does not answer. “You feel less lonely now I hope?”

She smiles sadly, watching as he climbs in beside her. “A little.”

They sit in a dazed and comfortable silence. Sansa rests her cheek against his chest, her glass on his belly. Abelas’s fingers draw absentminded patterns on the skin of her shoulder. The room is warm, her pulse is slowing, and for the first time in a long while she does not feel so unbearable empty.

“What was your mother like?” she asks. She almost tells him he doesn’t have to answer but knows that he wouldn’t if he didn’t want to.

“She was a quiet woman,” he tells her, taking a sip of his wine. “I was her only child. She worked very hard, so I did not spend much time with her. It was difficult to cope with when I was very young. I know that she wanted more for me, than to be a slave.”

“You’re not a slave.”

“No,” he says. “I am not.” His fingers stroke down the length of her spine. She shivers. “What about you? What was your mother like?”

Sansa sits up to take a drink. “I wish I knew. She left my da for another man when I was small. Some alienage merchant. Don’t remember much about her.”

“I am sorry.”

She scoffs. “Don’t be. My da can be a real bastard, and our clan was poor. There were some days I didn’t blame her. There were days I hated her for not taking me along. When I was growing up he tried to tell me that she’d loved me, but I don’t know. Sometimes I think I was just too much like him. Looked too much like him, talked too much like him. She resented him so much she couldn’t stand to see him in me.”

“Do you love your father?”

“I try.” She chews on her lip. “Sometimes he can make it really hard, but the older I get the more I realize that he’s just a man. He’s lonely, and bitter at the world, and I’m all he’s got left. So I try. He was a hunter once, like me. A good one, too. When I was a babe he fell out of a tree and lamed his shoulder, and after that he couldn’t use a bow anymore. It made him angry, and mean. After mamae left he put a bow in my hands and from that point on, that’s what I did. I didn’t play, I trained and hunted and learned. And I grew up hating him for it.”

“I take it this was not the life he envisioned for his only daughter.”

Sansa smiles. She turns her head, looking up at him. She reaches up to trail her pointer finger along the severe line of his mouth. “No. He wanted me to marry some sweet, pretty Dalish boy from a rich clan and have lots and lots of little red-haired babies. It’s easier to marry into larger clans if you’re a good hunter, so he made me into one.”

“Is that the life you wanted for yourself?”

“No.” She finishes her drink. Abelas takes her glass and sets it on the floor. “I think he just wanted me to have the family he could never give me. And I can’t hate him for that.”

“You are a wise woman, Sansa.”

“Now that’s not something I thought you’d ever say to me.”

“There is much I have learned in the time I spent wandering this new world. Much of it is jarring but… Much of it is comforting.”

“I am glad.”

He bends down to kiss her.

They make love two more times. She has him on his back, his hands tight around her hips as she rises and falls above him. Then he has her on her knees, her head tilted back and his lips trailing over her spine. After, as she falls asleep in his arms, she whispers into his skin, “thank you,” again and again, grateful for this chance to feel a little less alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Translations:
> 
>  _Garas, aman na'mis_ : Come to me, I will sheathe your sword
> 
>  _Garas. Aman na'mis_ : Relax. Let me make you come
> 
>  _Fen’harel ver na_ : Dread Wolf take you
> 
>  _Pala em elvar’el_ : Fuck me harder
> 
> All elvhen language courtesy of [Project Elvhen: Expanding the Elvhen Language](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3553883/chapters/7825850)


End file.
